A Digital Notepad

Google Chrome nailed it in my opinion with the address bar. It’s a typical address bar, but if you type something there that is not an URL, it guesses that you want to search it. Perfect! I find myself frustrated with Firefox, Safari and other browsers when I get errors after typing my search in the address bar.

In Firefox at least, it’s easy to get the search bar to work that way. I found this page offers a great walk through. It’s a quick 1 or 2 min tweak, and it uses Google as the fall back search.

After yo apply the tweak, you can totally remove the search bar from the Firefox interface in the top right.

A while back I wrote this post describing my efforts in looking for a way to rate iTunes shortcuts anytime with a quick shortcut on Mac. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I found the steps to enable this site wide was a bit different, thus this post was created.

First, use Automator to create the Services needed. Services will be available no matter what app is in the foreground.

1. Open Automator
2. Create a new “Service”
3. Under “Utilities” under the Library, add “Run AppleScript” as the first and only step in the Automation
4. Paste the following code in place of “(* Your script goes here *)”
   
tell application "iTunes"
set the rating of current track to 20
end tell

5. Save under the name “Rate as 1 star”
6. Change “20″ to “40″ then Save As “Rate as 2 stars”
7. Change “40″ to “60″ then Save As “Rate as 3 stars”
8. Change “60″ to “80″ then Save As “Rate as 4 stars”
9. Change “80″ to “100″ then Save As “Rate as 5 stars”

That finishes up the Automator work. Just be sure you used “Save As” and not “Save”, you don’t want to overwrite your services, but create 5 different services.

Now, go to System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts. Select “Services” on the left window, and in the right window you should see (at the bottom) the 5 services you created.

You can click in the white space to the right of the services (not intuitive really, but there is a little spot on the right you can double click to edit the short cuts for all the items in that list.)

Once you add a shortcut there you should be able to use the short cut from anywhere!

Be warned, I found it very tricky to find a short cut that worked for me in all apps, since some apps or services (mainly iTunes) had shortcuts similar to them. (Snapshot utility for example is Cmd-shift-4, which may be a shortcut you wanted to use.)

I found that the Cmd-Option-Shift worked for me best.

UPDATE: Add Growl Notifications to show that the song was indeed rated!



This is a screen shot from Automator showing the Service for Rate as 1 Star

Well, this is an easy and quick addition to the Automator services. I constently found myself switching to iTunes to see if the song was rated… kind of defeted the purpose of adding the shortcuts!

I realized (in somewhat of a “duh” moment) that I could just use Growl to add a little note for each of the ratings. I already had Growl installed (it’s a standard install for any Mac of mine.) And best of all Growl is very Automator friendly, so it just took a few seconds to add a pop-up Growl notification for each Rate as ? Service!

Ok, this is probably something that has been known for some time now… but since when did Windows offer the ability to scroll sidewas by holding Ctrl + Alt while using the mouse scroll wheel?

I wish I knew that a while ago. Apple has been doing that for a while, and I was glad to find that you could do so while holding Shift while scrolling rather than relying on the stupid fragile Mighty Mouse side scroll.

I’m using Vista, but i wonder if It’s possible in XP or other older versions…

I asked myself the question today, is there a way to rate a song in iTunes with a keyboard shortcut? Yes, there is.

I found a walk-through on how to do this at www.macgeekery.com
describing how, but it’s a walk through that’s better suited for those looking to learn how to write more scripts.

If you just want to get it working, here’s how…

1. Open the System Preferences, open Keyboard & Mouse, click on the Keyboard Shortcuts
2. Create 5 new short cuts, name them Rate as 1, Rate as 2, … Rate as 5. (Remember how they are named exactly) Make each of the 5 short cuts react to the short cut you want to, e.g. I set Rate as 1 to apple-alt-1, rate as 2 to apple-alt-2 and so on
3. Create the folders if they don’t exist, but you’ll be saving 5 files in /Library/iTunes/Scripts (or ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts in you only want the short cuts in one users iTunes)
4. Open the application Script Editor (Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor) and enter the following into the script window…
   

   tell application "iTunes"
   set the rating of current track to 20
   end tell

   (thanks for the error fix Andy)

5. Save As “Rate as 1″ exactly as the short cut that was created is named, in the folder you created in the last step. (File format should be script)
6. Do this four more times, but before you save change the 20 from above to match the following (20 = 1 star)(40 = 2 star)(60 = 3 star)(80 = 4 star)(100 = 5 star)
7. Almost set, now you just need to restart something called SystemUIServer. Open the Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor), then find the Process Name (SystemUIServer) and Quit Process. Like the Finder, if you Force Quit it will just re-start almost instantly. (Alternatively, you could reboot the computer)

You should be all set now, in iTunes you can rate the selected song with the keyboard short cuts. If you don’t like apple-option-number you can use whatever you want, just tweak the keyboard short cuts menu.